Back from Outer Space.

Okay. I'm back. I had to take a few days to retreat into my little cave of self-pity. The housing issue has been quite stressful. Where I smartly used my running to combat stress last week, I avoided it for supposedly the same reason this week. I sort of regret it, but at the same time, sanity is important, and the sidewalks and trails will always be there when I'm ready for them.

I had become so worried about the whole situation that I think I was worrying myself sick, as two days ago I started to get a scratchy throat and became unusually tired in the middle of the day. I resigned myself to bed and family comedy ("My Wife and Kids" on DVD) for the rest of the day, throwing in fresh fruit and Emergen-C for immunity. The next day the scratchy throat was gone (yay!) but the tiredness was in full force even after 10 hours of sleep (boo!), so I stayed at home all day and did absolutely nothing. That turned out to be a brilliant plan, as I feel perfect today.

I baked a vegan chocolate cake! I have a vegan friend who is always cooking and baking delicious things, and the first time I had her vegan chocolate cake I was hooked. "VINEGAR?" I sniffed, as I watched her bake. "VINEGAR cake?" "You can't taste it," she assured me. She's right. You absolutely can't. And if you're a dark chocolate maniac like I am, vegan chocolate cake is definitely the way to go. Something about eggs, or milk (is there milk in regular cake? See how much I know about baking, haha) makes conventional chocolate cakes seem milk chocolate-y, but veganize it and you will be amaaazed by how rich, moist, and black-coffee colored the cake will be. I also then made a broccoli-cheddar soup, which Mike and I both adore. I used unsweetened soymilk (but still regular butter and cheese--I'm not vegan, I just try not to eat a lot of dairy) and it still came out fantastic. All in all a good food day.

Speaking of food, I think I should address that a little bit. I'm vegetarian. I have been for nearly nine years now. It was a personal choice based on my own ethics, not diet or religion or anything else. I'm not the best vegetarian in the world, though. I don't mean that I cheat and eat meat (it completely stopped being appealing to me after a few months), but rather that I just don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. I probably don't eat a lot of protein either. Processed foods are enough of a trap for the average American, but for vegetarians, it's just so easy to eat frozen tater tots or tortilla chips all the time. Who wants to take the time to stir-fry up some tofu or make your own veggie burgers? I'd like to be a lot better about how I eat, but both Mike and I are basically poverty-level. I haven't had a job since last November. I have a job lined up on campus for the fall, FINALLY, but it's still very part-time, and I'll be a full-time student as well.

You can't deny produce is expensive. You also can't deny that anything the "average American" considers expensive is EXTREMELY expensive to me. Tofu used to be $1.00 or $1.50 for a one pound box; it's now usually double that. Those recipes that "feed a family for around $3.00 a serving" don't impress me. Bring it down to about 75 cents a serving and we'll talk!  I'm exaggerating a little bit... but there's a reason the Rice and Beans Diet or the Ramen Diet are staples of college cooking.

Ahem. Anyway, my point in going into all that is that even though I've taken "before" pictures showing my weight, it's entirely possible that I won't lose much or any weight in this venture. I simply don't have the income or the time right now to eat as well as I would in an ideal world. I'm eating broccoli-cheddar soup, for goodness sakes. It's got broccoli in it, but it's no health food. (By the way, the recipe says it takes an hour to do? I'm slow and it took me about 30 minutes. So don't believe them.) But then, as I addressed in the first post, I'm not overweight. I don't need to lose weight. I've read that the way you eat is much more impactful on weight loss than exercise. But I can at least get my body in decent working order. This is not a weight-loss goal. This is an "I can do anything if I just commit myself to it" goal. This is an "I can run past people without getting winded" goal. Any weight I lose would be merely by coincidence. I'll document it all the same.

SO, tonight I finally ran again! It'd been I think four days--maybe even five. Ugh. But we jogged about .8 miles on the sidewalk in the dark. I had an unusual new pain: the fronts of my shins. As in, my shin bone. How does THAT work? I have no idea... it was kind of bizarre. But I pushed through it and it's not bothering me anymore. I've noticed my right calf is a bit tighter than my left, but I think it's my dominant leg and I probably push off harder with it. I'll just keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't get any worse.

Thanks for putting up with my lull, which was followed by this extremely long and possibly boring multi-topic blog.